Want to make an easy healthy change? Start with replacing cow milk.

These days it's so easy to switch away from cow milk as there's plenty of tasty, healthier alternatives:

Many people have decided to ditch dairy already and are enjoying the benefits. If you're looking for a way to start to transition to veganism, or just a way to increase your health, replacing dairy may be the easiest place to start.

There are now so many varieties all with their unique flavors:

• Almond Milk
• Soy Milk
• Rice Milk
• Brown rice Milk
• Oat Milk
• Hemp Milk
• Cashew Milk
• Hazelnut Milk
• Pea Milk
• Coconut Milk
• Quinoa Milk
• Sunflower milk
• Flax milk
• Sesame milk
• Macadamia milk
• Amaranth milk

Since taste is subjective we suggest trying a few different plant-based milks and finding your favorite!

Ditching dairy will cut your risk of various diseases, and the dairy industry has long been trying to hide this.

The first US dietary guidelines issued in 1980 recommended a reduction in saturated fat intake (found mostly in dairy products), which was then heavily protested by the dairy industry. The dairy industry responded by sponsoring groups to create misinformation to minimize the potential health risks of dairy, using studies deliberately designed to mislead people into thinking saturated fat intake is not harmful.

Along with saturated fat, dairy products also contain cholesterol, transfats, endotoxins and Neu5Gc - all of which may raise the risk of inflammation, and create the perfect environment for heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Turning cows into milk machines has led to epidemics of "production-related diseases", such as lameness and mastitis (udder infections), the two leading causes of dairy cow mortality in the U.S. This weakness is due to genetically manipulating the animals and supplementing hormones which cause unnaturally high milk yields.

According to the USDA, 1 in 6 dairy cows in the U.S. suffers from clinical mastitis. This level of disease is reflected in the concentration of somatic cells in the milk. When a cow is infected, more than 90% of the somatic cells in her milk are neutrophils, the inflammatory cells that form pus. The average somatic cell count in U.S. milk per spoonful is 1,120,000, however the dairy industry says that pus in milk doesn't matter because the milk is pasteurized, basically meaning the pus gets 'cooked'.

Milk has also been found to contain an alarming cocktail of hormones including: progesterone, oestrogen, cortisone and other adrenal steroids, IGF-1 growth hormone, leptin, oxytocin, prolactin, thyroxine and triiodothyronine. This makes sense as it's designed to rapidly grow a baby calf from 75lbs to 700lbs as rapidly as possible – but these certainly aren't components humans should be consuming.

But thankfully it's so easy to avoid all this by just switching to plant-based milks instead!

If you're not vegan yet, switching your milk might be the best and easiest place to start. In fact, over the last few years so many people have switched away from cow milk that the dairy industry is in serious decline. In the UK more than a thousand farms have closed in the last three years, and research conducted by Mintel shows that half (49%) of Americans now regularly consume non-dairy milk.

If you still need convincing that cow's milk is terrible - see why this London cafe recently completely ditched dairy.